Backpack Farm Welcomes Farmers Back to School

Backpack Farm Agriculture Program is an innovative approach to poverty alleviation in Africa through “green” farming. The program’s all-in-one backpacks are filled with everything a smallholder farmer needs for the growing season and includes certified seeds, drip irrigation, safety equipment, and most importantly, each backpack comes with hands-on training on how to best use the tools.

Training through a five phase program is designed and delivered to ensure farmers increase their harvests to semi-commercial levels of production to support local, regional and international marketplaces, to improve incomes and provide better nutrition to communities. The program also trains women, who produce 80% of the food reserves in east Africa, on more efficient methods of managing and tending to crops so more time can be dedicated to improve literacy and education among girls and women.

Backpack Farm’s five phase model for development is designed to help launch and expand local agriculture cooperatives by:

assessment and mobilization

training and production

production monitoring and market distribution strategies

assessment and risk management

expansion through reinvestment

With each individual farmer functioning as part of a greater whole to increase agriculture production and leverage the community’s reinvestment potential, and by institutionalizing training and quality monitoring, long term objectives of cooperatives can more effectively bring participants to improved livelihoods and self-determined prosperity as compared to small scale subsistence farming.

There are currently seven franchise distribution centres and training farms in Kenya and one in south Sudan that support Backpack Farm participants through training in over 40 skills-based agriculture and business classes.

Thank you Backpack Farm for making our world wonderful.

LET ME KNOW, REPLY BELOW: When was the last time you planted a seed and watched it grow?